President Donald Trump claimed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics overestimated Biden job reports by nearly 1.5 million just days after firing the head of the BLS.
He suggested, without evidence, that those numbers were rigged and instead touted new numbers from the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation on Wednesday.
“Those Kinko’s charts brought to you by the same people that brought you Project 2025,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough joked of economist Stephen Moore and the Heritage Foundation’s pro-MAGA stance on Friday.
The host of “Morning Joe” then said the president’s attempts to muddy data by appointing individuals who give him numbers he will be pleased with will not be a lasting solution.
“It’s all going to work itself out in the wash,” he said. “You can try to lie to reporters. You can try to lie to the press corps there, but you can’t lie to the American people who have lost their jobs or who have trouble keeping jobs.”
CNBC’s Senior Markets Correspondent Dominic Chu echoed this point, saying that now a greater issue remains as previously apolitical data gathering and transmission agencies are being politicized, thus forcing Wall Street and economists across the nation to operate under different guidelines.
“When you do have Stephen Moore, the economist up at the Heritage Foundation, pointing out these numbers,” Chu said, “there is a bigger concern on Wall Street now that there is a politicization of the statistics and the data that goes into telling all of us just how good or poorly the economy is doing.”
Chu added that people in Washington have made lifelong careers as statisticians only to be undermined because the numbers do not favor the president. He noted that if the president proposed new ideas for how to improve on survey methodology for how economists measure the economy that would be welcome by Wall Street.
“When you march out people who want to emphasize certain things but not others and then you put it against the backdrop of saying the Bureau of Labor Statistics had been manipulating the data in the past with no real evidence of that, that’s what’s causing some of the uncertainty,” Chu said.
“And it goes without saying that President Trump has not been critical of the BLS when those statistics went his way,” MSNBC’s Willie Geist added. “But now when they don’t, these statisticians are suddenly members of the Deep State.”
